Continuing my experimentations with cooking timer user interfaces, I stumbled upon a cute little rotary encoder on Sparkfun. It immediately looked like a good match for the project. The thing is that all cooking timers I’ve seen have either a simplistic interface requiring many clicks to set the time (like clicking the “minutes” button 50 times) or a complex keypad with way too many buttons. At first I thought I’d need 2 axes (axis 1 would increment by 1 minute and the other axis by 15 minutes) but fiddling around with the trackball showed me that it was ...
I recently purchased an ATI radeon 5850 and could not get it to work on my Windows Server 2003 R2 machine. The Catalyst drivers simply aborted the installation claiming incompatible OS and such. At first I got around it by downloading only the driver from ATI’s site, extracting it manually and then using the .inf file in $OUTDIR\XPINF to install the driver via the Device Manager. I even got full hardware acceleration by following this guide. This proved to work well, even though CC was not installed. However, I then got my hands on a second display and ...
I set out to use a trackball to control an alarm clock. It seemed to me like an interesting experiment in UI and another small lesson in electronics. I envisioned using the two axes for controlling hours and minutes (separately and simultaneously) and the tracking speed to specify increments (faster scrolling would mean larger incremcents). Finding a trackball was not easy. In fact I could only find two – a small clicky trackball from RS (sold also by digikey and mouser – feels pretty crappy) and a beautiful ALPS trackball that was sold by an Aussie company that seemingly unloaded its stock ...
As of now, I’ve only been playing around with electronics on and off for a year. The amount of know how in this field is tremendous, but sometimes you find yourself struggling over the simplest of things – for example, cutting breadboard jumper wires to perfect length. After I hastly prototype something on the breadboard (using cheap, flexible, premade jumper wires) and decide to keep it there, the jumper wires I use must be flat and next to perfect. If the wires seem wavy, bumpy or somehow unaesthetic I become homicidal. Below is the method I use to aid my ...
The Dot Factory is a small open source tool (MIT licensed) intended to generate the required C language information to store many fonts and images, as efficiently as possible, on a microcontroller. These fonts are then uploaded via the LCD driver (see the Drivers and Modules page for a few) to the actual dot matrix LCD. It is written in C# for Visual Studio 2008 and has been tested on Windows XP, 2003, Vista, 7 and Linux via Mono. Working with dot matrix LCDs with microcontrollers, while not difficult, is tedious. The actual LCD controller allows us to upload simple ...
